Tech Support Forum - View Single Post - Harddrive not found when optical drive attached

mmcandrew74 · 02-02-2008, 05:39 AM

I have a Dell Latitude c840.
It has stopped booting up properly.
When I reboot it hangs for 30 seconds while trying toad the bios then says 'Primary hard drive not found. Fixed Optical drive not found.'

I have tried reseating both drives and the battery.

The strange thing is that it will boot (to a command prompt on C:) if I removed the optical drive and the hard drive seems absolutely fine.

I have not yet installed an OS on my hard drive but I have copied win98 boot disk onto C:.

When I boot to C: (with the optical drive removed) I can push the optical drive back in and start windows in safe mode and can mount and read what's in the optical drive - so the optical drive appears to be OK too.

This is driving me nuts.
Could this be a problem with the motherboard itself?

Thanks,
Mike

02-02-2008, 05:39 AM	#1 (permalink)
mmcandrew74 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2008 Posts: 1 OS: None yet!	Harddrive not found when optical drive attached I have a Dell Latitude c840. It has stopped booting up properly. When I reboot it hangs for 30 seconds while trying toad the bios then says 'Primary hard drive not found. Fixed Optical drive not found.' I have tried reseating both drives and the battery. The strange thing is that it will boot (to a command prompt on C:) if I removed the optical drive and the hard drive seems absolutely fine. I have not yet installed an OS on my hard drive but I have copied win98 boot disk onto C:. When I boot to C: (with the optical drive removed) I can push the optical drive back in and start windows in safe mode and can mount and read what's in the optical drive - so the optical drive appears to be OK too. This is driving me nuts. Could this be a problem with the motherboard itself? Thanks, Mike